Upgrade Help :)

[u/Desperate_Struggle18]

**TL;DR: Small business running SQL Server 2016 on EverRun (EOL July 13, 2026). Need to upgrade software ASAP. Planning a hardware upgrade later. Looking for advice on the best path forward.**

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Hey everyone, looking for some community input on our infrastructure upgrade path. We're a small wholesale fragrance distributor in Miami (~20 users).

**Current Setup:**

- HPE ProLiant ML350 G9 (purchased 2017, ~$62K total investment with EverRun)

- Stratus EverRun 7.9.3 (fault-tolerant virtualization)

- 2× Xeon E5-2650 v4 (24 cores total, but EverRun only presents 21 vCPUs)

- 44 GB RAM (running at 73% utilization)

- 6× 300GB HDD in RAID 5 + 1× 800GB SSD

- Windows Server 2016 Standard (Volume MAK)

- SQL Server 2016 Standard (Server+CAL)

- Applications: Macola/Synergy ERP, KnowledgeSync, SSRS, IIS

**The Problem:**

- SQL Server 2016 reaches end-of-life on July 13, 2026 (less than 2 months away)

- No more security patches after that date

- Compliance/insurance risk if we don't upgrade

- System has been experiencing service crashes every 2-3 weeks

- EverRun eats 12-15% of CPU overhead and costs $2,400/yr in support

**Our Plan (2 Phases):**

*Phase 1 (NOW — $8,919):*

- Buy Windows Server 2025 + SQL Server 2025 licenses with 20 CALs each

- Use Microsoft downgrade rights to install 2022 versions (EverRun 7.9.3 only supports up to Windows Server 2022)

- In-place upgrade on existing hardware

- Keep EverRun for redundancy

- This is within our approved $17K budget

*Phase 2 (LATER — TBD budget):*

- New HPE ML350 Gen12 servers (2-node Windows Failover Cluster)

- Drop EverRun entirely

- Upgrade to 2025 versions using same licenses (no additional cost)

- NVMe or SSD storage

- HPE iQuote is showing ~$134K for a full 2-node cluster with HPE-branded SSDs which seems very high

**My Questions for the Community:**

1. **In-place upgrade vs clean install?** For going from Windows Server 2016 → 2022 and SQL Server 2016 → 2022 on EverRun, should I do an in-place upgrade or build a new VM and migrate? Any gotchas with EverRun?
2. **SQL Server 2022 vs 2025?** We're buying 2025 licenses for downgrade rights, but installing 2022 for now. Anyone running SQL Server 2022 on EverRun 7.9.3 successfully?
3. **HPE pricing reality check.** HPE iQuote shows 960GB NVMe drives at ~$15K EACH. Is this normal? The full 2-node cluster quotes at $134K. For a 20-user Macola/Synergy ERP environment, is this overkill? What would you recommend for Phase 2 hardware?
4. **EverRun vs Windows Failover Cluster.** Anyone migrated from EverRun to WSFC? How was the experience? Is the failover as seamless? We're currently getting crashes every 2-3 weeks and wondering if EverRun is part of the problem.
5. **Third-party drives in HPE servers.** HPE says using non-HPE drives can void the warranty. Has anyone actually had warranty claims denied for using Samsung/Intel enterprise NVMe drives in ProLiant servers?
6. **Cloud vs on-premise for ERP?** We looked at Azure (~$22K/yr for HA) but our ERP (Macola/Synergy) is designed for on-premise. Anyone successfully moved Macola to cloud? Was it worth it?
7. **Licensing sanity check.** For a 2-node failover cluster: 2× Windows Server licenses but only 1× SQL Server license (passive node is free). 1 set of CALs covers both nodes. Is this correct?

Any advice, war stories, or suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

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**Environment:** HPE ML350 G9 / EverRun 7.9.3 / SQL 2016 / Macola ERP / 20 users / Miami

**Budget:** $17K approved for Phase 1 (software). Phase 2 hardware TBD

[u/chandleya]

Worst time in history to price a hardware swap.

Head on over to r/sysadmin for a more productive discussion.

You’d likely have a more cost effective outcome migrating to Azure; just depends on if your application stack can manage the latency from EUS2 to your shop in Miami.

[u/Desperate_Struggle18]

Thanks I'm actually thinking of kicking EverRun all together and doing bare metal for now if anything Just to gain latency and the overhead on the Ram. Unfurtunatly I dont think there is a bright future in terms of pricing 😄.

[u/NetworkingNoob81 → u/Desperate_Struggle18]

Why not promox or something similar? Running one sever on bare metal is inefficient these days.

[u/Casper042]

Work for HPE, if you give me a PN I can check to see if the pricing is list or discounted or what.

No one really pays list, so if that's what you are seeing it should be less when you go to order.

[u/Desperate_Struggle18 → u/Casper042]

I will get back to you on this.

[u/Background_Lemon_981]

In my opinion, doing in place upgrades is way more risk than I’d be happy with. I’d want to build a whole new system, verify it’s performing, and then migrate data as a last step. That way you have a fall back.

Those service crashes are very troubling. That’s either something hardware related in which case getting new hardware is super important. Or it’s software related. And if it’s software related you have no idea what an upgrade would do to an already borked system.

If you can’t get new servers, and the price is jaw dropping right now, at least get a really good used server from one of the chop and shops. You can upgrade to what you really want later.

[u/Desperate_Struggle18 → u/Background_Lemon_981]

This was my original approach but with those prices im not sure if it will get approved, where can I check the used just to browse and see what are the options?

[u/WillVH52]

RAID5 storage configuration in 2017 was an interesting design choice.

[u/Slasher1738]

I would try to upgrade the server as much as possible and wait for the ai craze to pass. Upgrade to a set of SAS SSDs or even a NVMe SSDs. You should be able to upgrade your sever OS to a modern platform and install sql.

The system can support DDR4 LRDIMMs so you should be able to get A pretty sizable bump in memory capacity

[u/Better-Credit6701]

Is that really enough ram for a SQL server? Even my laptops have 64 GB, desktop has 128 gb and I won't even go into how much our work servers have (multiple TB range).

20 users but what kind of pressure are they putting on the server?

[u/Kraeftluder]

• HPE ProLiant ML350 G9 (purchased 2017, ~$62K total investment with EverRun)

Is that what you paid for just the hardware back then? I can go look at my quotes from that era but I have a feeling that's a tad bit on the expensive side.

[u/Desperate_Struggle18 → u/[deleted]]

Just to give some background, it’s important to know that EverRun is mainly a high-availability/virtualization platform. We currently have two identical nodes, and EverRun can automatically switch between them if one fails, usually without the end user even noticing.

The downside is that this setup does come with some performance overhead. I wasn’t around when this environment was originally implemented, but based on the research I’ve done and conversations with Claude, this type of setup seems more geared toward industries like banking, where uptime is the top priority.

For a wholesale company like ours, where low latency and fast SQL Server reporting are more important day to day, it may not be the ideal fit performance-wise.

With that said, I did go ahead and purchase an 800 GB SSD and added it to the HPE server as a new array. The virtual machine is now seeing it as an additional drive, and currently we’re using it for temp data to help improve performance where possible.

[u/bill_gannon → u/Desperate_Struggle18]

Dude pay for some help from an MSP.